I wouldn't be too woried about frying an Antec PSU due to their protection circuicts but E-machines motherboards are total garbage and if it is not already dead it will likely die eventually. I would just put the new board in and get rid of the old board.

I did some checking on AVG, and while Norton is rated lower than most, Bitdefender and McAfee seem to get higher marks than AVG in the reviews I looked at. Any views on these products versus AVG? I have to admit I like the 5 PC/2 yr pricing option for AVG.

On my ongoing problem, when I attached the HDD as a slave and tried to copy the files, it rebooted my new machine. On restarting, XP ran chkdsk on the slave drive and repaired some indices on the NTFS before starting windows. I ran NAV on all volumes and it didnt find any viruses.
I was able to recover all files and save to my new PC.

When I put my the HDD back as master in my old Emachine, and booted with the XP install cd, it told me that I was in the middle of an install and asked did I want to continue. I figured why not, but it then got stock looking for some drv file later on and I had to restart again.

That's where I left it, but apart from firguring out the issues with reinstaling XP, it looks like I am on the road to recovery.

Rik and dmill, thanks so much for your help on this project. It's really appreciated.

McAfee and bitdefender are also good options but I like AVG's licenceing better and I like the fact that it uses very little system resources.

For the XP reinstally you will likely have to reformat and possibly zero the drive to get rid of all of the old E-machines files.

I'm glad you almost have it all sorted.

Its nice to be appreciated!!!